11. Thanks to Bluemyst for a line you gave me in a review that I have used in here. Still powerful. Thanks, hon. xx
“I’ll be recording our sessions, Brian, so that I can go back over them in the future. Is that okay with you?”
“Did you record Justin’s?”
“Yes, I did. So for the therapy sessions to work, Brian, you have to be prepared to be open and honest; not only with me, but with yourself as well. Otherwise, this is a waste of time. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Tell me about the first time you realized that Justin was more than a trick.”
“When I woke up next to him the first morning; I’d let him stay the night, rather than kicked him out after I’d fucked him. I let him shower, and I fucked him again in there before I took him to school, where I outed him to the entire student body with a smile on my face, and a pat on his little blond head.”
“Brian… you agreed to these therapy sessions. Don’t waste my time by giving me shit while you are here.”
“Tit for tat, Alex; that’s what we agreed on.”
“Within reason, Brian; that was the agreement. I told you that I won’t reveal what Justin has said, and I won’t let you use these sessions as an excuse to find out what the boy told me.”
“Tell me about Ethan, then.”
“He’s Justin’s friend; he’s grateful that Justin is a part of his life, and he supports him unquestioningly. He admires his artistic talent. What made you take Justin home the first time?”
“His appalling fashion sense. How many times did Ethan fuck Justin?”
“That’s really none of your business anymore, Brian – if you want to know, just listen to Michael…oh, that’s right, you already did. And look how well that turned out. I told you – you can’t use these sessions to answer all of the questions that you have in regard to Justin. So, are you ready to stop wasting my time yet?”
“His innocence; I could all but taste it on him as he leaned against the streetlight. He fucking glowed that night, and I was as high as I’d ever been. I’d never looked at chicken before; twinks do nothing for me, but there was just something about him. I had to have him.”
“Once.”
“What?”
“Ethan fucked Justin… once. Those were the rules, right?”
“…Oh.”
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
“Have you seen Justin?”
“No. He still refuses to talk to me.”
“So, he’s not doing his sessions?”
“Tell me why you let Michael get away with trying to run your life.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, Brian, that you let the man dictate how you perceive yourself. Do you really think that I haven’t heard Michael spout off about the fact that you are the Stud of Liberty Avenue? That you don’t do love, or boyfriends, or commitment? He’s half the reason why you are here now.”
“I don’t do…”
“Don’t waste my fucking time, Brian! You told me that you were willing to fight for Justin – all I see before me right now is a man who is shit scared of letting someone in behind his walls in case they hurt him. I told you once that for someone who has enough disorders to merit his own classification in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, that you were one of the most well-adjusted and high-functioning bastards that I knew.
“I was wrong, Brian – you’re not functioning at all, and the series of hopeless addictions that you are so well known for? They’ll probably end up killing you. You need therapy even more than Justin, and if you want a chance in hell of getting him back, then you have to change some of those addictions.”
“How the hell am I meant to change my addictions, Alex, when the biggest one I have is Justin?”
“If you think that your biggest addiction is Justin, then you are well and truly fucked. You’re beyond even MY help.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your biggest addiction isn’t fucking or drugs and drinking or even Justin – no, Brian. Your biggest addiction is to the myth of who people think Brian Kinney is. Until you learn to stop using that myth as a crutch, you will never be able to move forward; you will never regain Justin’s love or trust, and he will continue to walk away from you.”
“How…”
“By being honest with me, Brian; by not allowing Michael to put you up on the pedestal that you can no longer climb down from. By not allowing him to tear apart the man you have proclaimed to love. Justin defended you so often, Brian, to the people in his life. Yet you stood back and let Michael treat Justin like shit. What is it that Michael has on you?”
“He was the place I could go to as a kid; I owe him and Debbie.”
“You don’t owe them shit, Brian, least of all the pound of flesh that Michael seems determined to strip from Justin’s bones. It’s high time you learned that; ask Debbie what you owe her for looking after you as a kid. I’ll talk to you in twelve months when you wake up from the smack to the back of the head that she will undoubtedly give you for asking such a stupid question.”
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
“Have you seen him?”
“No. Sam picked up Justin’s script for his antidepressants this morning. Tell me when you knew you had feelings for him.”
“…”
“Brian?”
“When I kept fucking him after that first morning; he chased me the first time, but after that? I kept pulling him back into my bed.”
“Was it because you were the first man to touch him?”
“Maybe… I don’t know. He was… refreshing, you know? He wasn’t… all posturing. He couldn’t hide how he reacted to what I did to him. I loved how it made me feel when he was so fucked out, that he’d become this sticky, whimpering mass of limbs that couldn’t string two words together. But he could moan my name like it was the only word he was capable of speaking. Any other trick, and it was ‘more’, ‘harder’, ‘oh, Jesus’. But Justin… he would get so lost in sensation, that my face was all he saw. Not my reputation – he saw me.”
“How did that make you feel?”
“Tell me about Ari.”
“Brian…”
“Tit for tat, Alex.”
“I met Ari when he was eighteen. I was twenty-nine, and I fell for him so fast that I back peddled, and held him at arm’s length. He was a kid – what did he know about love? Enough to know that I was all he wanted or needed. I didn’t trust that; I said I wanted an open relationship, that I was happy to keep fucking him, but I wanted to fuck other men, too. He loved me so much that he agreed to it.
“For a year, that’s how we lived. But bit by bit, he broke my walls down. By the time we had been together for two years, we were fully monogamous; living together, fucking raw, the whole shebang. Then Ricky came back to the Pitts. He’d been living in New York for the last couple of years, and when he came home, he had decided that it was time for us to stop playing games and be together. I wasn’t interested - I had the most beautiful man I had ever seen in my bed.
“But he was persistent - Ricky pushed and prodded and tugged at the string that held our relationship together until he found the end. He constantly reminded me that Ari was too young; too inexperienced for a man my age. That I should let him fuck around with younger guys, until he got it out of his system. That I shouldn’t be tying myself down, either – I was a gay man, for fuck’s sake, it was my God-given right to fuck as many men as I wanted. And like the idiot I was, I listened to him; he was my best friend – why would he try to hurt me?
“So, I told Ari that I was going to start tricking again. And before I knew it, we had unraveled. Ari moved out; he said that he was sick and tired of being in a relationship that consisted of three people. I let him go; I figured he’d fuck around, and them come back to me when we had both gotten it out of our systems. Instead, he met a man named Grant a few months later – he was older than me by a couple of years. He took one look at Ari and scooped him up – he offered him everything I had taken away from him. Love, stability, a partnership. Respect. Respect that he knew his own mind.
“By the time I figured out that tricking was stale – that fucking anonymous asses wasn’t as exciting or as fulfilling as fucking the one man who knew every single inch of my body; by the time I figured out what I had let Ricky do, it was too late. Grant had asked Ari to move in with him. I’m not ashamed to admit, Brian – I begged him to come home to me. He asked me why should he walk away from the man who had taken a broken boy and freely given him love, when I was the reason he had been broken in the first place?
“They, uh… they got married last year. They had a little girl, via surrogacy. And Grant reminds Ari every day how much he loves him, how much he appreciates him. And I’m reminded every day that I had that beautiful man, and I threw him and the love he so freely offered me away. That it could have been me that Ari married. That he had children with. I could have had what Grant has if I had just listened to my heart, instead of listening to every other bastard out there.”
“Where’s Ricky now?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. He got what he wanted – I fucked him, and then told him to fuck off. I haven’t spoken to him in the five years that Ari and Grant have been together.”
“Five years? And you still love him?”
“I’ll love Ari until the day I die, Brian. To me? He’s irreplaceable. Your time’s up.”
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
“Have you seen him yet?”
“No. Why are you afraid of letting people know that you love them?”
“I tell Michael all the time that I love him.”
“Are you being deliberately obtuse?”
“If I tell Justin that I love him, then he has the ability to utterly destroy me. I’m not willing to give him that power over me.”
“Why do you think that Justin would hurt you, Brian?”
“He already has, Alex. When he humiliated me at Babylon by letting Ethan kiss him in front of every fag on Liberty Avenue.”
“And you don’t think that fucking Rage in front of those same fags humiliated him?”
“That’s different. That guy was just a trick.”
“No, Brian, he wasn’t. He was a message that you sent to Justin, and he received it loud and clear. Why do you think he let Ethan kiss him?”
“At the time, I thought it was because he was choosing Ethan over me.”
“Message sent and received, Brian. Cause and effect – you left Justin with no choice when you fucked Rage, and he deliberately hurt you the only way he knew how. It wasn’t like he could fuck another guy – you’d already done that, and everyone knew it. The same as everyone knew about the rules, thanks to Michael running his mouth; everyone knew that you didn’t kiss tricks anymore. Justin kissing Ethan was his answer to the unspoken question you asked of him when he saw you with Rage – he was no longer willing to put up with you hurting him every time you felt threatened.”
“Michael said he had seen Justin and Ethan kissing in the street. What was I meant to think?”
“Are you telling me, Brian, that that is what caused you and Justin to implode? A kiss?”
“Michael said that Justin and Ethan were seeing each other – I had no reason not to believe him. He’s my best friend; he’s always looked out for me. While I hate what he said to Justin, when he told me about Ethan kissing Justin, he was only looking out for my best interests.”
“No, Brian, he wasn’t. He was looking out for his own. He hated Justin; he made no secret of that. You have to remember, Brian; Justin was my patient for three months, and he spoke a lot about how Michael treated him. He spoke a lot about how you let Michael get away with treating him the way he did. Michael resented Justin’s place in your life, the way a toddler resents its sibling taking their favorite toy.”
“…Do you know why Ethan kissed Justin?”
“Yeah, I do, Brian. Ethan had been away for a few days, and when he caught up with Justin on the street that day, it was the first time he had seen the posters for Rage, and the completed comic. He was congratulating Justin on his… accomplishment; telling his friend how fucking proud he was of him, to have faced his biggest nightmare. That’s why he kissed Justin, Brian.”
“….I… I didn’t…”
“You know, Brian, when you hold a mirror up to the truth, the reflection you get back is uglier than the lie you put your faith in. You should have spoken to Justin, instead of listening to Michael. Maybe if you had had the same amount of faith in Justin that he had once had in you, you wouldn’t be in this position now.”
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
“Before you ask, no, I haven’t seen Justin. Why did you persist in taking tricks back to the loft after you and Justin made those rules?”
“Because it’s where I live?”
“No, Brian – you have the baths and the backroom for tricks. Try again.”
“Because it’s where I live.”
“So, it wasn’t a message to Justin?”
“What the fuck?”
“Justin said that he didn’t want, nor did he expect you to change; he just didn’t want to come home and have your tricking shoved in his face. So why did you persist in taking your tricks back to the loft? In fucking them in the bed you shared with the boy? In leaving the dirty sheets on the bed that you expected him to share with you?”
“….”
“I know about the ‘dates’, Brian; about the games you played with Justin. The tricking. You had it all in him; a beautiful young man who was willing to take you any way he could. So why did you persist in fucking guys at the loft? Was it a message to him? That he would never really ‘have’ you? That the loft was your home? But not his. Only yours; you could do whatever the hell it was you wanted, and he just had to go along with it.”
“….I thought he wanted more than I was willing to give.”
“He didn't want that much from you, Brian. You only thought that he did. You were the one with all the romantic ideas; the one saying that Justin wanted romance and flowers and monogamy. And maybe he did want those things at some point, but do you know what he wanted more? You. He was willing to accept you just as you were, even though it meant having to change how he felt about certain things. He was willing to make those concessions for you; you weren’t willing to make the same concessions for him.”
“I didn’t know how to be in a relationship. He was my first one.”
“No he wasn’t, Brian. You’ve been in a faithful, long-term friendship with Michael since you were fourteen years old. So, don’t tell me that you’ve never had a relationship before. Tell me something; if you saw some guy treating Michael…no, let’s use your son as the example. If you saw some guy treating Gus the way you treated Justin, what would you do?”
“That’s not fair, Alex! Gus is just a kid!”
“…So was Justin.”
“What is your fucking problem!?”
“My problem, Brian, is that you aren’t being honest with me; and by not being honest with me, you aren’t being honest with yourself. I want you to think about why you react the way you do, why you deliberately push people away. I told you – if you want a chance at getting him back, you have to look at why your relationship with Justin fell apart the way it did. Do you think you can grow a pair of balls and do that?”
“….Yeah…”
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
“I grew up in an abusive household. My father was a drunk who beat me for sport, and loved to tell me that my mother should have had an abortion when she found out she was pregnant with me. My mother is a drunk, who hides behind the church, and wields her faith like a weapon; she would rather curl up inside a sherry bottle; that’s how she dealt with the fact that her husband was a violent prick who hated her for trapping him into a marriage he didn’t want. My sister is a useless cunt, and her kids will probably grow up to become serial killers. The first person who ever showed me love was Michael.”
“So, your childhood sucked ass.”
“Understatement.”
“You know what I don’t understand, Brian? You got out; you went to college, and you’ve made yourself into a very successful businessman. You have forged a new family for yourself. And you had the envy of nearly every second man on Liberty Avenue, because of your looks, your talent, and the fact that you had Justin in your bed. So why are you still letting your parents ruin your life?”
“I’m not – Daddy dearest is dead, and I haven’t spoken to my mother in over a year after she found out I was gay, and she told me that I was going to burn in hell for it.”
“Brian… you hide behind your self-imposed walls because you are afraid of being hurt; you learned to build these walls to hide how bad you had it growing up. Yes, you had a really shitty childhood; there is no doubt. But you can’t use that as an excuse to not let people get close to you. Nor can you use it as an excuse as to why you treated Justin the way you did.”
“It’s easy for you to say that, Alex; you didn’t live it.”
“No, I didn’t. What I had was foster home after foster home; between the ages of nine and eighteen, I lived with over fifteen different families. I suffered sexual abuse when I was twelve and my foster daddy decided that he liked fucking little boys. I was beaten, reminded that I was nothing more than a paycheck, and otherwise ignored.
“The difference between us, Brian, is that I refused to let my childhood dictate who I was going to become as a man. I went into psychology so that I could help people who suffered the same way that I did. Was it scary opening myself up to the chance of love with Ari? Yes, it was. Do I regret it? No. Even after I lost him, how can I regret loving him while I had the chance? Am I open to loving someone else? I don’t know; not while I still love him the way I do, but maybe someday.”
“I didn’t know.”
“It’s not something I put on my business card, Brian; my point is, stop letting your parents and your past tell you who you are as a man. Stop letting Michael tell you who you should be as an adult. You need to figure out who Brian Kinney is; your persona, your reputation, the driving need to prove your parents wrong… those are all obstacles that are standing between you and Justin. The question you should be asking yourself is why did Justin love you? What did he see behind the walls that made him fall so in love with you, that he willingly changed who he was as a person in an effort to make you happy?”
“I don’t know.”
“Brian; Justin wouldn’t talk about you in therapy with me, because he viewed it as the ultimate betrayal. But he did discuss you with Ethan, Sam, and Daphne. They in turn, told me what was said. He told Ethan that the thing he had always admired about you the most wasn’t the size of your dick, or your prowess in bed. It was your unfailing loyalty to your family and your friends. He saw through your walls like they didn’t even exist; how did he get behind them?”
“I don’t know. If I knew the answer to that question, Alex, maybe I could be the person he saw.”
“Daphne saw that person the night of Prom, Brian.”
“And look how well that fucking night turned out.”
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
“Why didn’t you celebrate Justin’s birthday?”
“Because I only celebrate achievements.”
“But how can you measure what Justin has achieved, when he is barely an adult?”
“What do you mean?”
“Brian, your relationship with Justin was always an unstable power play between a man and a boy on the brink of adulthood. What you perceive as weaknesses in Justin are things that are completely beyond his control. As the adult in the relationship, you held all the power over him; you were in a high paying job. He worked at a diner, where the fact that he has an amazing ass and smile was ninety percent of the reason he was tipped so well; that only reinforced how he feels about himself now.
“You own your own home; from the moment he came out as gay, Justin has never had any control over where he lived. He bounced between you and Debbie from the minute he was kicked out of his home, until the moment he left you. He never felt like the loft was his home – he felt like it was only yours, and that the reason you bought tricks back to the loft was to remind him of that – this it was your home, and if you didn’t like it, there was the unlocked door.
“How can you measure what he has accomplished at seventeen or eighteen or nineteen, when you are measuring it unfairly by what you have accomplished at the age of thirty and thirty-one? Think back – what had you accomplished at that age? Other than the beginnings of your reputation and your education? If you look at it like that, he’s run circles around you – he’s a published artist, who has sold his art for profit. He was accepted into one of the most prestigious art schools in the country. You were so caught up in what everyone else expected you to do for his birthday, that you didn’t even think to ask Justin what he wanted.”
“I… I thought he wanted romance. Roses.”
“Jesus, Brian. The boy has to take two different allergy pills every day – I know what Justin wanted from you for his birthday, and it wasn’t flowers.”
“What did he want?”
“Peace, Brian. Just a quiet day for the two of you; where you watched TV and ordered dinner in. Spent the day fucking. Maybe smoked some choice pot. Those were Justin’s words, Brian – his exact words. He would have been happy with a new sketch pad and some pencils; but again, you don’t celebrate birthdays, only achievements.
“So, I’ll give you an achievement - if Chris Hobbs had hit him even a centimeter more to the right, he wouldn’t have even been there to celebrate his nineteenth birthday. He survived a boy bashing his skull in because he had been outed to the entire school. He survived having permanent brain damage – a fucking artist, Brian, having to relearn how to even hold a pencil? But he hasn’t achieved anything…has he?”
“That’s not fucking fair, Alex! He should have said something to me!”
“When Justin started therapy with me, Brian, I told him that he had to be the one who was willing to start talking, instead of bottling it up inside. He told me that unless the other person was willing to listen, unless they were willing to hear what he was saying, what was the point? Justin is a young man who has had to fight for too long and too hard for so little return. And in the end? He felt like no one heard him, even when he was screaming at the top of his lungs. He gave up, Brian. Long before his birthday, he gave up trying to be heard.”
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
“Have you…?”
“No. He refuses to talk to me. I spoke with Daphne, and she and the boys are continuing to live by his therapy rules.”
“Oh.”
“So, what happened with Gary Saperstein, Brian?”
“…”
“There are a lot of rumors floating around.”
“Back when Justin was dancing at Babylon, Gary asked him to dance at one of his private parties. Justin agreed, and while he was there, Gary drugged him.”
“Shit.”
“Justin told Emmett that Gary tried getting him into a sex swing, even though he was saying no. The guys who were there were saying that they wanted to try out Kinney’s private stock; Gary referred to Justin as a party favor. Another dancer was already being raped, and Justin got out of there by the skin of his teeth.”
“Shit… that’s what he meant.”
“Who?”
“Justin said that he had had a hard-enough time being called your whore when you were together; we touched on it briefly again after that, and he said that he wasn’t a rent boy, even though someone had once tried using his ass as a party favor. He had a bad session that day, and he shut down not long afterwards.”
“I never viewed Justin as a whore, Alex.”
“You might not have, Brian, but a lot of other people did. And they weren’t shy about telling him that.”
“Who?”
“Jealous men, Brian.”
“Did Michael…?”
“Do you really have to ask me that, Brian?”
“Shit.”
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
“When did you know you had feelings for Justin?”
“When he told me that he got 1500 on his SATs. I told him he could go anywhere with a score like that, and he told me that he had applied to Dartmouth and Brown. I damn near drove off the road.”
“He’s exceptionally smart.”
“Yeah, he is. I was…agitated for most of the day; wondering which school he would go to – they were both out of state, and the thought of him leaving the Pitts made my head hurt. He came over that night, and I damn near fucked him through the mattress and into the loft below mine. By the time I calmed down, I’d already fucked him twice, and he was lying on his stomach in bed, so fucked out that he could barely move. I asked him how many schools had come begging for his favor, and he shocked the shit out of me when he answered. Did you know that Brown, Dartmouth, Harvard, Yale, and Stanford all offered him a place?”
“Daphne mentioned something about it. What did you say to him about it?”
“I uh… I gave him a list of pros and cons for each school; he kept getting distracted because I was running my fingers up and down his spine. But eventually he mentioned that he had also applied to PIFA; I couldn’t believe it – the fact that he might leave the Pitts for school was a very real thing, you know? I ended up teaching him a different lesson that night – how long could I make him hold out while I was rimming him?
“He made me proud – he lasted for quite a while, but he ended up coming so hard that he passed out when I was fucking him. I can remember telling him that Stanford didn’t teach proper little gay boys about rimming while I was cleaning him up. He was so fucked out that all he could do was whisper my name. I told him that if he stayed, then his education would be second to none.
“I cleaned up in the bathroom and when I came back to bed, I opened another condom and pushed back into his ass. He always wanted to fall asleep with my cock inside him, but I didn’t want to risk hurting him, or losing the condom inside of him. But I needed to be close to him that night – I held him for an hour, until I had completely softened and then I pulled out. I held him all night; I watched him sleep until the sun rose. That’s when I knew I was falling in love with him.”
“Why didn’t you tell him, Brian?”
“What if he left me?”
“Brian…”
“Hind sight is called a bitch for a reason, Alex; I know that better than anyone. I was so fucking scared he’d leave me, that he’d be able to hurt me if I told him I loved him, that I kept it from him. I kept him at arm’s length; I know I hurt him by doing that; I’m not completely ignorant. And he left me anyway; he left me, not because I tricked or because I fucked up with him so many times. He left me because he asked me if I would care if he was gone… and I told him that I wouldn’t. He left me because the one thing that would have made all the other shit worthwhile is the one thing that I refused to tell him.”
“Lesson learned, Brian?”
“Yeah… lesson learned.”
“Would you tell him if he walked through the door right now?”
“If I thought that he’d believe me? Yeah. But I know he wouldn’t. I know that he thinks that all he was to me was a convenient fuck. Short of getting on my hands and knees and begging, which, let’s face it, I’ll never fucking do, I don’t know how else to even start getting him to reopen the door to me, Alex.”
“Brian?”
“Yeah?”
“I never thought I’d beg, either.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”